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NORMAN J CLEMENT RPH., DDS, NORMAN L. CLEMENT PHARM-TECH, MALACHI F. MACKANDAL PHARMD, BELINDA BROWN-PARKER, IN THE SPIRIT OF JOSEPH SOLVO ESQ., INC.T. SPIRIT OF REV. IN THE SPIRIT OF WALTER R. CLEMENT BS., MS, MBA. HARVEY JENKINS MD, PH.D., IN THE SPIRIT OF C.T. VIVIAN, DR. TERENCE SASAKI, MD LESLY POMPY MD., CHRISTOPHER RUSSO, MD., NANCY SEEFELDT, WILLIE GUINYARD BS., JOSEPH WEBSTER MD., MBA, BEVERLY C. PRINCE MD., FACS., NEIL ARNAND, MD., RICHARD KAUL, MD., LEROY BAYLOR, JAY K. JOSHI MD., MBA, JELANI ZIMBABWE CLEMENT, BS., MBA., IN THE SPIRIT OF THE HON. PATRICE LUMUMBA, IN THE SPIRIT OF ERLIN CLEMENT SR., WALTER F. WRENN III., MD., JULIE KILLINGSWORTH, RENEE BLARE, RPH, ADRIENNE EDMUNDSON, ESTER HYATT PH.D., WALTER L. SMITH BS., IN THE SPIRIT OF BRAHM FISHER ESQ., MICHELE ALEXANDER MD., CUDJOE WILDING BS, MARTIN NJOKU, BS., RPH., IN THE SPIRIT OF DEBRA LYNN SHEPHERD, BERES E. MUSCHETT, STRATEGIC ADVISORS
BY
PAUL H. VOLKMAN, MD, PH.D. US FEDERAL INMATE (19519424)
“A summary of my experience with the federal “justice” system and my federal case“
A Two-Part Series from Dr. Paul Volkman MD, Ph.D., See Part-1, here
MD, The University of Chicago, 1974
Ph.D., Pharmacology and Toxicology, The University of Chicago, Medical Scientist Training Program, 1972
Fellowship, Cardiovascular Pharmacology, Prof. Leon Goldberg, The University of Chicago, 1975-77
Board certified, American Academy of Pediatrics, 1981, 1992
Board certified, American Academy of Emergency Medicine, 1983, 1994
Board certified, American Academy of Medical Pain Management, 2004
Expert testimony, medical malpractice lawsuits, 1985-2000
Clinical practice: Emergency Medicine, Family Practice, Pediatrics, Pain Management, 1975-2006
THE STORY OF PAUL H. VOLKMAN, MD, PH.D.
During the lawsuit-ridden practice of emergency medicine from 1975 to 2004, I was attacked by four “starving-attorney lawsuits,” all baseless, but all leading to the insurance providers settling the cases out of court to save money, without any admission of wrongdoing or malpractice on my part. In 2004, I was notified by some insurance group that I would no longer be able to purchase malpractice insurance for emergency medicine work. I was then forced to seek employment as a doctor in a venue where such coverage was not absolutely required.
I accepted a job in a pain management clinic in Southern Ohio, Tristate Health Care, run by a local businesswoman, Denise Huffman. I had investigated the situation and the personnel and satisfied myself that the clinic was not some “pill mill”, nor would it be under my practice. I made clear my requirements to see patients in the Tristate Clinic:
1)complete medical records from previous treating doctors, documenting the legitimate need for treatment of chronic, severe pain with opioids;
2) strict compliance with follow-up appointments, urine drug tests, pill counts, and taking of medications as prescribed, without taking of anything additional, legal or otherwise;
3) all patients would be required to buy a small safe from Walmart bolted to their floor, in which to store pain medications; 4) no early appointments, no missed appointments, no reporting that meds had been “stolen”;
5) agreement to take prescribed doses in the clinic under the observation of the nurses;
6) Any patients who fail to comply with any of these rules will be dismissed without the possibility of returning.
Portsmouth was a desperately poor, rusted-out shoe manufacturing town, with a Walmart and a Kroger’s, a Bob Evans, a few fast food outlets, many car mechanic shops, and little else. As everywhere in Appalachia, there was (and is) a brisk market for prescription pain medications.
As a result, I spent much of my efforts attempting to determine which of my patients might be diverting their pills to the street. The drug dealers and pill diverters networked with each other to defeat all efforts to detect diversion: when a patient was called in for a random pill count, he or she contacted a friend to loan them the pills they needed to pass the pill count. When I instituted the in-office pain medication dosing, those not taking their prescriptions as ordered or at all knew that they would not be able to take the prescribed doses without passing out; one-half of my “patients” disappeared, hopefully leaving me with real pain patients who really needed and took their meds.
These procedures were recommended by the American Academy of Pain Management and required by The Ohio Intractable Pain Treatment Act of 1998; I also added the in-office dosing to my regimen.“
THE DEA IS AN UNREGULATED CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT THAT HAS DESTROYED THE AMERICA HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
“As soon as I began work at Tristate, the DEA immediately assumed that I was there to continue the “pill-mill” practices of others. At a later DEA administrative hearing after my DEA certificate had been revoked, a DEA agent revealed that they had paid visits to all of the area pharmacists to tell them not to fill any of my prescriptions, on pain of losing their licenses and jailed. Within a few weeks, my patients reported traveling to Cincinnati or Columbus to fill my prescriptions.
I was denied bail as a “flight risk;” as a Jew, I was assumed to be an Israeli citizen. This was untrue.
I then decided to institute a dispensary in the clinic to provide the medicines I prescribed to my established patients, legal under Ohio law, as long as I was present in the clinic. It was either that or quitting providing needed medical care. Almost immediately, the DEA sent waves of undercover agents to Tristate to make “controlled buys”, but my nurses spotted them and sent them all away empty-handed despite their handfuls of cash.
Next, agents were sent in with fake medical records; they were all sent away until the supposed treating doctors verified the records and the patients. They set up surveillance to document the expected hundreds of customers from surrounding states daily; only 20 to 25 patients arrived daily.
At trial, the agent lied, saying that hundreds milled about in front of the clinic; he had to admit that the hundreds were actually at a soup kitchen across the street. The prosecutor, Tim Oakley, later obtained a search warrant based on a wired visit of one James Russell, who had been caught selling pills. The Agent-In-Charge(AIC) lied about my conduct during the visit, apparent in a recording transcript, but the judge refused to suppress the search.
The DEA found a gun in the medication safe, registered to Huffman (and used for protection in a crime-ridden town), but did not confiscate it and did not close the clinic then.
Oakley obtained an indictment against me by threatening former patients with jail if they did not tell the grand jury that they had lied to me to obtain more pain pills than they really needed to get extras to sell; 14 former patients told that exact story at trial; Barry Houser in open testimony at trial pointed to Oakley and testified that Oakley had threatened to put him and his wife in jail if they did not go along with the tale.
My 36-page indictment charged me with 18 deaths, conspiracy to illegally distribute controlled substances, “resulting in death”, maintaining drug-related premises, and “using a firearm in furtherance of a drug-trafficking offense.” The indictment was filled with false allegations and unsubstantiated, false hearsay, none of it ever proven, most of it never the subject of court testimony.
In January of 2006, the United States Supreme Court (Scotus) decided GONZALEZ V OREGON, 546 U.S. 243, which concerned an “Interpretative Order issued by AG Ashcroft, which stated that any physician who employed controlled substances in accord with Oregon’s Death with Dignity Law for assisted suicide, would lose his license and face jail if he did so.
The United States Supreme Court (Scotus) held that the AG did not have the expertise or authority to declare any area of medical practice sanctioned by valid state law to be illegal. In fact, the Soctus noted and affirmed that Section 903 of the Controlled Substances Act, 21 U.S.C. 801ff, stated that the CSA did not supersede or overrule any such valid state law for the medical use of controlled substances.
When I read that case, I was thrilled; the Scotus holdings of Oregon appeared to mean that, as long as I carefully followed the Ohio Intractable Pain Treatment Act, I was protected from federal prosecution for violating 841(a), as actually stated in the text of the Ohio law.
Two weeks later, the DEA SWAT team, complete with helicopters and local law enforcement, closed down my office, which I had set up in Chillicothe, Ohio, after parting ways from Denise at Tristate. She had stopped paying me my salary.
In Jan of 2007, I unsuccessfully contested the revocation of my DEA certificate at a court hearing. In May of 2007, I was at home in my Chicago Lakeshore Drive apartment caring for my wife Nancy, who was dying from a malignant brain tumor. 15 machine gun-toting DEA agents swarmed into my apartment and dragged me away in chains and shackles.
I was denied bail as a “flight risk;” as a Jew, I was assumed to be an Israeli citizen. This was untrue. After about six months of “pretrial detention,” I was released to home confinement to take my dying wife to her hospital for radiation treatments. At her funeral, I expected the SWAT team to appear to drag me away from the gravesite ceremony. A few days later, I collapsed with a blood sugar of 650 and was in the hospital for eight days.
The Government finally provided a hard drive with the discovery in June of 2009 containing my former patients’ medical charts and prescription records. I was assigned two CJA court-appointed lawyers, whose job was to convince me to plead guilty and walk me into prison for the rest of my life. After neither one would respond to phone calls, emails, or letters,
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I demanded new counsel. This led to a hearing at which Chief District Judge Dlott put handcuffs on me and told me that if I did not “cooperate with my outstanding court-appointed counsel,” she would revoke my PR bond and send marshals to put me in jail again, giving me a choice between ineffective counsel, no counsel, or jail. My lawyers are neither prepared nor presented with any defense.
When we finally met, I told Wende Crystal Cross that my case was one of the hundreds of prosecutions of pain management physicians, part of an ongoing assault on pain patients and their doctors, considered “drug-addicted customers” and their drug purveyors, by the Government. (See Ronald T. Libby, “The Government’s War on Pain Doctors“, CATO Institute, 2005) Wende’s angry response: “We are not going to put the Government on trial!!” Turns out that Cross had married Marvin Cross, a convicted drug dealer who drove around Cincinnati in a red Maserati. She had also worked as an AUSA in a cubicle next to prosecutor Oakley for ten years! Cross drove a Porsche SUV, lived in a beautiful stone house, and appeared in court in a different new outfit each day of the 9-week trial. I believe that my attorney was corrupt and colluding with the prosecution.
At trial, I presented Hal Blatman, MD, a Cincinnati pain doctor and board member of the American Academy of Pain Management, who testified that I had followed every requirement of federal law and of the Ohio Intractable Pain Treatment Act. He stated I had provided my patients with outstanding pain management and general medical care.
Also testifying on my behalf, Dr. Forrest Tennant, MD, was the eminence grise of medical pain management, who had defended Howard Hughes’ pain doctor, and later Elvis Presley’s doctor. Tennant published “Serum Opiate Levels in Severe, Chronic Pain Patients,” demonstrating that the serum opiate levels in his well-functioning pain patients were more than double the supposedly lethal levels published in Basselt, the government manual used to determine overdose deaths.
Tennant testified that he had employed the same combinations of medicines as I had used (I had followed his published recommendations!), which were quite safe if taken as prescribed, and without alcohol. Tennant testified that many of his severe pain patients were quite ill and that many would die under his care from their chronic conditions.
Harry Bonnell, MD, nationally noted forensic pathologist and toxicologist, testified that, according to the work of Dr. Tennant, NONE of my patients had died from an overdose of medications I had prescribed.
Despite the testimony of my outstanding medical experts, the jury chose to believe the three government stooges, paid to come to court and lie, whose junk science testimony I had not been given the required opportunity to contest at a pretrial “DAUBERT” hearing.
In pretrial, the judge agreed with a Cross motion that the indictment would not be provided to the jury for deliberations; as the jury was filing out to deliberate, the judge handed the indictment to the foreman without objection by Cross.
At the jury instruction conference, I requested a jury instruction has taken verbatim from the holdings of OREGON: “To find the defendant physician guilty of violating the Controlled Substances Act, you must determine that the Government has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he has utilized his prescription-writing powers to engage in illicit drug dealing and trafficking as conventionally understood.” The judge rejected the instruction and added: “There has been no testimony of personal profit per se.” In other words, no evidence was presented of “drugs for money.”
Three United States Supreme Court (Scotus) cases have held that no conviction of a violation of the CSA is possible absent “drugs for money” or “some sort of commercial transaction” (Lopez, 2006; Carachuri-Rosendo, 2011; Moncrieffe, 2013). The case should have ended when the judge uttered those words on a Rule 29 Motion for Acquittal; my counsel did nothing. I was convicted of 4 deaths and 14 other felonies and handed four consecutive life sentences and 60 months for 924(c), the firearm offense.
In 2014, the Scotus remanded my case to the 6th Circuit for further consideration in light of BURRAGE, in which the Scotus held that, for enhanced sentences to be imposed for 841(b)(1)(c), illegal distribution of controlled substances resulting in death, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the drug cited in the indictment (in my case oxycodone) was the “but-for,” or “stand-alone” cause of death.
However, the government stooges had all testified that all of the deaths of my former patients had been “multi-drug overdose deaths,” clearly not solely attributed to oxycodone alone.
Undeterred, the 6th Circuit panel twisted the holdings of BURRAGE to mean that “but-for” really meant “contributory-to” and reimposed all of the sentences unchanged. I appealed the ruling of the 6th Circuit back to the Scotus; certiorari was denied. I filed a 2255 motion claiming eleven constitutional violations from the proceedings; the judge denied the motion in one sentence: “The Court agrees with the Government’s argument. Accordingly, the 2255 motion is DENIED.” I appealed the denial to the 6th Circuit, which denied a Certificate of Appealability. I appealed that denial to Scotus., which refused certiorari.
After 12 years in federal penitentiaries, there is now a ray of sunshine. On June 27, 2022, the Soctus decided the cases of Drs. Ruan and Khan ruled that the jury instruction was improper and vacated the convictions. The jury instruction now required the government to prove criminal intent or mens rea, i.e…. that the doctors had INTENDED to violate the CSA, prescribing controlled substances beyond their authorization and without a legitimate medical purpose. This jury instruction is, in fact, the one that my judge rejected and in fact, specifically referenced in the 10th Circuit holding of Khan.
It is clear that Ruan and Khan 9-0 now overturn my case, yet I am still sitting in a federal penitentiary. I have no record attorney and no money to hire one.
Please forward the previous email to this list of lawmakers and any comments you wish to add.“
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